I create a WebHelp with RH 9. It is a new project which was created in RH 9.

The text contains words in bold (like this). Some short lines (style Normal like the text) are also bold. These lines are not headlines, but they should be highlighted in bold (see below).

To add bold I use the bold button of RH. When I generate the WebHelp and open it in Firefox (currently version 11), then words within a text and the short bold line look different ?! The single word appears extra bold and the line appears normal bold.

Why does the generation procedure handle bold things different? And why does it add the <b> tag for words within a longer text? I don't want to create a special style sheet for bold words when there is a button to make a word bold.

I just did a quick test on RH9 and Robo inserts the span as wel as the for the span and the paragraph in my case. Is there a special routine you use for making bold paragraphs? I fiddled with several settings, but I could not get the result you describe.

yes, RH9 inserts span. This is correct. Now generate a WebHelp and open this in a browser like Firefox 11. The single word within a text appears super bold and the bold paragraph appears normal bold. Right click into the text shown in the browser and display the HTML code. Now you see <span><b>word</b></span> (= super bold) and <span>paragraph</span> (normal bold).

Mmmh, I tested on two different RoboHelp installations. On one installation, I don't get the result you describe. On the other installation I do get the HTML code you describe, but I don't see any difference in bold text in the output. I must be going nuts...

Could your CSS be interfering somehow by adding a 'font-weight: bolder;' to the <b> element? I will test some more to see what makes the difference.

Whether this appears as "super-bold" in a browser seems to vary depending on the user. When viewing the topic in Firefox 12, the bold text looked fine to me, but a colleague who viewed the same topic on her PC (also in FF12) saw the text as "super-bold."

I wonder if this means that it is something to do with some local browser settings or display settings on the PC used to view the topic?

I think I figured this out. This seems to be a Firefox issue whereby the <b> tag in conjunction with some additional bold formatting on the text (via a style or span tag) is interpreted by Firefox as "bolder". We are using Arial 10pt for the style in the css, so Firefox looks for a font that is bolder than Arial Bold and renders the text as Arial Black.

This is apparently caused by Direct2D/DirectWrite hardware acceleration in Firefox. Disabling hardware acceleration resolved the issue for my collegue. You can do that from the Advanced tab in the Firefox Options dialog box. Interestingly, I have hardware acceleration enabled and I don't see the issue at all, so go figure!

For reference, here is a screenshot of the topic in Firefox 12 from my colleague's laptop with hardware acceleration enabled.

Here is a screenshot of the topic in Firefox 12 with hardware acceleration turned off.

I'm not sure what the HTML/CSS specifications say about how the double bold formatting markup should be interpreted by browsers. Mozilla doesn't seem to consider this a bug.

However, I do wonder what the reasoning is behind RH inserting those <b> tags. If the HTML specs do say that <spanstyle="font-weight: bold;"><b>Text</b> should be interpreted as bolder text, then RH's addition of the <b> tag is changing the markup to something that was not intended by the author.

Your images are the same size but note that the words at the end of the line starting "Pinnacle" are different. That suggests the issue is to do with the zoom level the two machines are set at. Check that out.

this is interesting. I disabled hardware acceleration and the text appears as it should. All bold things have the same appearance - that is what I want.

Screenshot (disabled hardware acceleration):

Screenshot (enabled hardware acceleration):

Both have same zoom in Firefox 12, in version 11 it looked the same.

Telling the customers to disable hardware acceleration when using Firefox before reading the online help is not a good solution. The best would be that RH stops generating <span><b>...</b></span> things and this happens after I started the Web Help generation. I cannot influence this.

Apart from reporting is as a bug, as a workaround, you can use a script or a search and replace to remove all the tags from your output. It’s more work for you, but you customers won’t have to do anything.

I see similar differences in the source and output and have toggled the hardware acceleration before launching the help. I can see no diiference but a quick Google suggests it is only going to impact certain machines anyway.

Have you established the code you refer to is linked with the problem by editing an output topic to remove it?

If those additional <b> tags in the output would not be there, everything would be ok. And those tags are definitely added by RH. I do nothing else than writing the content in RH and when finished I press the button for webhelp generation. I think, I write a bug report.

Of course I could delete all <b> tags from the output files - hoping that there are no other <b> tags that are necessary somewhere. This workaround takes time: I have ca. 50 files, 6 languages and 3 variations for each language.

Which machines are mentioned by google? I'm working with Windows 7. Last year I was working with Windows XP and there I did not have this problem.

I am not arguing that you are doing anything with the code or denying that RoboHelp is adding the <b> tag. You are saying "If those additional <b> tags in the output would not be there, everything would be ok." My point was to edit those tags out of the output file to see if all is then OK. From what I am reading you are saying they are the cause but I am not clear whether that is theory on your part or that you have proved it.

Enter "Direct2D/DirectWrite hardware acceleration" into Google and see the first link. That suggests to me the setting will only affect machines with certain hardware.

In Design View I created two paragraphs to start with and applied Bold to the first sentence and a single word, the to the whole second paragraph.

Where there are closing span tags, in the output you will get the extra <b> tags that are causing your problem. You will note there is no closing span tag in the second paragraph and no <b> tag gets written in the output.

<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">This is some sample text.</span> This

is some sample text. This is some sample text. This is some sample text.

This is some sample text. This is some sample text. This is some sample

text. This is some sample text. This is some sample text. This is some

sample text. This is some sample <span style="font-weight: bold;">text</span>.</p>

<p style="font-weight: bold;">This is some sample text. This is some sample

text. This is some sample text. This is some sample text. This is some

sample text. This is some sample text. This is some sample text. This

is some sample text. This is some sample text. This is some sample text.

This is some sample text.</p>

Then I hit Enter and clicked the bold icon to return to normal weight and got this crazy HTML.

I seem to have the same problem with RH9 and my solution is to replace the <span style="font-weight: bold;"> and </span> tags with <b> and </b> because it did not happen everywhere and I did not mind handling the issue manually.